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The Wisdom of Father Brown
by G. K. Chesterton
February, 1995 Etext #223
The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Wisdom of Father Brown by Chesterton
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G. K. CHESTERTON
THE WISDOM
OF FATHER BROWN
To
LUCIAN OLDERSHAW
CONTENTS
1. The Absence of Mr Glass
2. The Paradise of Thieves
3. The Duel of Dr Hirsch
4. The Man in the Passage
5. The Mistake of the Machine
6. The Head of Caesar
7. The Purple Wig
8. The Perishing of the Pendragons
9. The God of the Gongs
10. The Salad of Colonel Cray
11. The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
12. The Fairy Tale of Father Brown
ONE
The Absence of Mr Glass
THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist
and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front
at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows,
which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble.
In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado:
for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness
not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed
that Dr Hood's apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry.
These things were there, in their place; but one felt that
they were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there:
there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars;
but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always
nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalum
containing three kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence,
stood always on this table of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted
that the whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level.
Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room was lined with
as complete a set of English classics as the right hand could show
of English and foreign physiologists. But if one took a volume
of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the mind
like a gap in a man's front teeth. One could not say the books
were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of their
being chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old churches.
Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as if it were a public library.
And if this strict scientific intangibility steeped even the shelves
laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables laden with drink and tobacco,
it goes without saying that yet more of such heathen holiness
protected the other shelves that held the specialist's library,
and the other tables that sustained the frail and even fairylike
instruments of chemistry or mechanics.
Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded--
as the boys' geographies say--on the east by the North Sea and on the west
by the serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist library.
He was clad in an artist's velvet, but with none of an artist's negligence;
his hair was heavily shot with grey, but growing thick and healthy;
his face was lean, but sanguine and expectant. Everything about him
and his room indicated something at once rigid and restless,
like that great northern sea by which (on pure principles of hygiene)
he had built his home.
Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and
introduced into those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments
one who was perhaps the most startling opposite of them and their master.
In answer to a curt but civil summons, the door opened inwards
and there shambled into the room a shapeless little figure,
which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella as unmanageable as
a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic bundle
long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat, clerical
but not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of all
that is homely and helpless.
The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment,
not unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously
harmless sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer
regarded the doctor with that beaming but breathless geniality
which characterizes a corpulent charwoman who has just managed
to stuff herself into an omnibus. It is a rich confusion of
social self-congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat tumbled
to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a thud;
he reached after the one and ducked after the other, but with
an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:
"My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I've come about
that business of the MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people
out of such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong."
By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made
an odd little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.
"I hardly understand you," replied the scientist, with
a cold intensity of manner. "I fear you have mistaken the chambers.
I am Dr Hood, and my work is almost entirely literary and educational.
It is true that I have sometimes been consulted by the police
in cases of peculiar difficulty and importance, but--"
"Oh, this is of the greatest importance," broke in the little man
called Brown. "Why, her mother won't let them get engaged."
And he leaned back in his chair in radiant rationality.
The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes
under them were bright with something that might be anger or
might be amusement. "And still," he said, "I do not quite understand."
"You see, they want to get married," said the man with the
clerical hat. "Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married.
Now, what can be more important than that?"
The great Orion Hood's scientific triumphs had deprived him
of many things--some said of his health, others of his God;
but they had not wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd.
At the last plea of the ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him
from inside, and he threw himself into an arm-chair in an i...
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